


Motion

by Artusende



Category: Smile For Me (Video Game)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dissociation, Drugging, Flower Kid is of age, Horror, Oral Sex, Other, POV Second Person, Reader-Insert, Whump, dental phobia, gender neutral reader, heed the tags please keep yourself safe, idk if I've just gone soft or because this fandom is close to my heart but this is not a nice fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-19 22:21:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22071904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Artusende/pseuds/Artusende
Summary: He smiles.All you see are his teeth. There’s so many. You can’t look at his eyes and you stare at his mouth. They smell of old blood, coppery like a nosebleed. Corner to corner, all teeth; a hellscape of molars and canines contained within a mouth and pressed into your face. You can feel him watching you take in his smile, but you’re too terrified to look back up and meet his eyes.
Relationships: Dr. Boris Habit/Reader, Flower Kid/Dr. Boris Habit
Comments: 11
Kudos: 62





	Motion

**Author's Note:**

> So, I have severe dental phobia. As in, I've jumped through the hoops of getting it clinically diagnosed by a psychiatrist... so I can get a prescription for lorazepam... for the sole purpose of getting my teeth cleaned. After writing about 3k words, it hit me what exactly I was going to make myself write, but I'd put too much work in to jump ship.
> 
> In short: I had to write this, so I'm posting it and subjecting you all to it. Happy new year!

As you’re falling asleep on your little cowboy-sheet cot, the faint sweetness in the air that had been following you all day intensifies. It’s not unpleasant, but it’s noticeable, like the smell of a house that’s not your own. You suppose there’s nothing you could do about it, considering that it seems to be the air itself, so you push it out of mind. It wouldn’t be surprising if Dr. Habit started burning incense in the vents; he seems like the type of weird, sort of hippie-ish kind of guy to like incense.

With tiredness hitting you like a concrete wall, as it always has in the Habitat, you pull the sheets up to your chin and roll on your side, shutting your eyes.

Bright, shapeless colours start to shimmer and flash behind your eyes. They don’t look any different from what you see seconds before you fall asleep. But you’re a little confused: you’re not really that close to sleep. You’d only just shut your eyes.

They intensify, bordering on hallucinations, vivid not-colours flickering across your eyelids – and then you feel sky-high dizzy, like you’re being rocked in a hammock or you had too many drinks too fast, like you’re backflipping in place. You’re rolling in clouds; rolling in fog; a kite set sailing, cut from its string, in the wind. This isn’t normal. Your eyes feel sewn shut. How the hell did this happen so fast? Where did this come from? A little coal of panic sparks itself alight in your chest, but you’re falling asleep too quickly to do anything about it. The energy seeps out of your muscles but your consciousness is wide awake, tugging at your body’s reins, trying to stir a response. _Oh God,_ your panic says, clawing against your ribs with a frightful, tingling anxiety, one that can’t make it to your fingers and make them shake like you can tell it wants to. _Oh God. Something is wrong. Oh God._ Then the blackness behind your eyes swallows you and you cease thinking.

_Oh God._

xXx

You awake to a foggy, watery headache, the world turned ever so slightly on its axis. You slowly push yourself up on one arm and everything careens with you as you sit up. As you press your hand into the mattress, it feels like your palm slides down into the cushion and through the floor. Slow waves push the floor around underneath you and nausea up into your throat, like being on a boat in a storm. Darkness presses within an inch of your face, despite the murky dawn coming in through the windows.

You hear giggling somewhere, invisible through the thick cobwebs of dark. God, you can barely see.

Fear shimmers in your ribs and you force yourself up off the bed. Your legs shake like a fawn’s. Something is wrong. The creeping discomfort that’s pressed at the back of your mind for weeks – held at bay with flimsy excuses, that Dr. Habit was “eccentric” or "had good intentions” – is overwhelming now, thick and whole with vindication.

Something is wrong. You promised Kamal you would figure it out and you’re going to. You set your mind onto this single purpose and push yourself forward robotically.

The air is sweet, stronger than it was yesterday and damp now, too, like an aerosol perfume. It has to be a gas of some kind in the air. You can’t think of what it might be, though, hazy as you are.

Standing and taking a few shaky steps helps shake the cobwebs from your head a bit. You stumble out of your room and jump out of your skin when one of Dr. Habit’s paper children suddenly materialises out of the dark fog clouding your vision, giggling with a drawn-on smile. She’s probably unaffected by the gas and has her sight intact to watch you fumble drunkenly about like a college freshman at their first party. You avoid her gaze and stumble to where Kamal told you the tunnel would be.

Then Dr. Habit’s voice crackles over the intercom. “Oh! You’re awake! Good morning, you!”

You don’t feel awake. This all feels like a nightmare. You're barely in contact with your own body; you hardly feel your feet touch the floor, and your head spins a few inches above your neck like a balloon. Even standing up, you’re fighting to stay awake.

Dr. Habit continues, deep-voiced and staticky. “The big event is finally here!” Around you, giggles bounce off the concrete walls. The room must be filled with his paper daughters. Paranoia coils in your head at the thought of them lurking invisible in the corners, Sharpie pupils fixed on you.

“As promised, the air is full of smiles and giggles! Breathe deep and let the fun times hit you like a choo-choo.”

You’re so caught up in the childish phrasing – _choo-choo_ being particularly glaring – that you almost miss the hidden confession that, yes, Dr. Habit put something in the air. The florid sweetness seems to magnify, sticking to the back of your tongue like the taste of your mouth when you haven’t brushed your teeth.

Dr. Habit’s voice fades to the back of your awareness as you focus on putting one foot in front of the other. You lean one hand on the wall to stay upright, and the rough sensation of unpainted concrete on your fingertips tethers you in consciousness. Even as you almost fall down the stairs several times, feet unsure of where they’re landing as the steps descend into an abyss your eyes can’t pierce, you move forward. You will confront Dr. Habit; if not to recover your dignity, then out of a fear that if you don’t, you may not make it out of here alive. And if none of those, then for Kamal.

You remember the fear in his eyes when the subject of Dr. Habit came up, an obvious anxiety veiled with time and anger, one that spoke of experience. Brief as your friendship was, you felt for him.

You enter an open orange door. Distantly, you hear the voice overhead become tight and annoyed, like at a dog that won’t listen. The tunnel stretches forward into infinity, walls completely flat and featureless save for an occasional exposed pipe. You stumble forward, teeth grit. Every time you blink, it feels like entire minutes pass with your eyes shut, though you know it’s barely half a second. The intercom continues, deep and staticky, in the background; time shrinks and dilates in your perception like ribs expanding around lungs.

Then, after what feels like decades pass in the tunnel, the hallway opens up into a room. The sweet smell fades as you enter, thankfully. After a few breaths your headache becomes less opaque and you regain some ability to think. You can focus on Dr. Habit’s voice again, and you pick up the tail end of a sentence: “—warning. Turn around and maybe I’ll be nice to you.”

The gaudy orange paint of an elevator catches your eye. Refusing to be put off after you’d dragged yourself this far, you push yourself into the elevator and press the button for “up”. The little triangle is sticky and crackles like aged, cheap plastic under your fingers. You feel gross for touching it. The checkered tile underfoot looks like it’s been in place since the sixties, and hasn’t been washed since the seventies. Everything in here, in this tucked-away corner of the Habitat, looks disgusting and abandoned. You feel unclean just being in it.

The doors squeal shut in front of you, and the elevator slowly draws itself up with a steady, low groan. “Well, there’s no turning back now,” the intercom crackles.

The lines between the floor tiles seem to wave and blur unevenly, seeming to breathe in and out. You sway on your feet staring at how the lines waggle on the floor. Then, the bright chime of the elevator startles you back into awareness, and the doors slide open. You cautiously step out into another room, faintly yellow. Silhouettes of chairs stand ominously against the far wall like a tacit audience.

“Welcome to my world,” greets Dr. Habit flatly from overhead. There’s no trace of that nectar-sweet air in here, and you breathe in deeply with some relief. You look around, fear bubbling low in your chest, straining to see into the dark. It’s truly dark in here, and you fumble blindly forward with your hands out, reaching for the shape of the wall in front of you.

There’s a breeze against the back of your neck and a little rustle of fabric. Horror skates down your spine, but before you can turn around, a hand pushes a soft cloth to your nose and mouth. Another arm secures itself around your abdomen and squeezes you tight in a gripping bear hug. Your back hits the heat of another body. Instinct rattles your skull with terror, clearing the last vestiges of brain fog from the gas. You lash out like an animal, all flailing kicks and clawed fingers like you’ve sharpened your nails into points. But blind and panicked as you are, you achieve nothing against the strong hands pressing soft, sweetened air into your lungs. Faintly, against the saccharine, you smell latex. You want to scream in defiance – to fight, draw blood, get _away_ – but suddenly you can’t find the commands to get your body to do anything except ragdoll. You fade fast.

There’s a whisper in your ear, deep-voiced and accented, strikingly clear without the feedback of intercom static. “The doctor will see you now.”

xXx

Since the first wave of that sweet smell, when you were on your cowboy mattress, you’d felt adrift in an ocean; but now, waking up the second time, it’s thickened into tar. You swim up into consciousness slowly, barely breathing with the pressure in your head and around your lungs. It’s dark, and you don’t know if it’s your eyes failing, an unlit room, or if you’re finally, truly dead. It’s so cold. Your head hurts. Your mouth waters uncontrollably and you think you’re about to throw up.

Then that deep voice cuts in. “Good morning, you drowsy pants!” Startled, your eyes snap to the source and, of course, the room’s only focal point: a pair of half-open, orange eyes. They’re watching you keenly, eye contact unwavering. You can’t decide if that’s a good or bad sign. In the dim light, you can faintly see the outline of a face, but the eyes stand out, glowing, against the dark. “Look who it is! Why, it is you! And me!”

The awkward phrasing only adds to your feeling of dreamlike unreality. As you’re struggling towards consciousness, it sounds like the voice is underwater or filtered through a tunnel. Feeling caught on a carnival ride, everything constantly shifting around you, your head falls back limply. There’s a small comfort in some sort of headrest that supports your head and neck, and you fully relax against it and let the waves of nausea pass over you. Even the darkness itself seems to constantly move in your vision. You’re convinced you’re not real; you let yourself detach from this strange, unrelenting dream, and from the fear that cries out that _something is wrong._

The voice continues. “Have you guessed yet whom I am?” The eyes widen a little bit, adding an almost imperative air to the question. Then your mind connects the dots; this must be Dr. Habit himself before you, barely visible in the darkness. Without the lace of VHS static or intercom crackle, his voice is almost soothing, even with its awkward grammar and Russian accent. It’s deep and calm, pleasant to listen to. The way he speaks is almost friendly or even intimate; from his tone, you get the impression he sees this as a moment you and Dr. Habit alone are sharing.

(Alarm bells continue to ring distantly. _Something is wrong_ but you don’t know what.)

You try to shake the cobwebs from both your vision and your mind, but with your indisposed fine motor control, your head ends up lolling back and forth on the headrest. The motion restarts the spinning sensation you’d just started to get over.

“Well then… boy, do I have a surprise for you!” Dr. Habit cuts in cheerily, voice clear against the murk.

Your brow knits in confusion before you realise that he’d interpreted your loose, inebriated movements as you shaking your head “no”. You hadn’t even thought he expected an answer.

The eyes in the darkness move closer to you, never breaking eye contact with you. “I’m not just ‘Dent’…” His voice goes quieter and drops just a hair lower. “I’m. The.”

The lights snap on and sear your eyes. “…Dent- _est!”_

You immediately flinch as your lingering headache blossoms horribly into a migraine, a tight band of pain that squeezes around your temples with the light. You try to raise your forearm to shield your eyes when your arm doesn’t move at all.

For a second, you think it’s the effect of whatever gas Dr. Habit had pumped into his crazy little summer camp, leaving your muscles weakened. Then you feel your arm pressing against a band around your wrist, one that rattles metallically – and you hope even harder that it’s just the gas, horror sinking into you despite your disbelieving naivete.

You squint into the light and find Dr. Habit’s silhouette. He looks almost seraphic, ringed in blinding light and haloed with a thick cloud of filaments like cotton candy.

Then he comes into focus and you see he’s smiling cheerily, close-mouthed, his immense ponytail of thick hair catching the light. "I see that look in your eyes… are you starstruck?”

Despite the illusion of an angel fading, you still feel that this is the last thing you see before you die.

After a too-long silence, you belatedly realise Dr. Habit is waiting for a response from you. Has he never heard of a rhetorical question? You shake your head no, but stop quickly when the room shakes with you.

Dr. Habit hums and steps into the centre of the room, clasping his fingers under his chin. “Well, then – allow me to explain my own brilliance!”

He moves almost like he’s dancing, swaying back and forth, his ponytail shadowing his movements like a pendulum. It’s dizzying to watch, especially in your current state, so your eyes wander to the walls. Looking closer at them, you realise they’re covered in a childlike mural that perfectly matches the doctor’s own demeanour. Trees painted in broad, basic shapes stand against a butter-yellow backdrop. The soft edges and warm tones make you feel out of place with your cold, raw fear.

As you study the walls, Dr. Habit continues. Unable to comprehend more than one thing at a time, you push his words to the background as you stare at the safe paintings on the walls. His deep voice fades into the same buzz of the fluorescent lights – until Dr. Habit snaps to your side and speaks directly into your ear. “I want to make _everyone_ happy.”

You jump against the restraints and refocus on him. (Now, you notice that even your feet are hooked to the chair’s footrest.) Despite the horrors he’s committed – gassing a community, kidnapping you, tying you to a chair – he looks so… normal. Even his little grin as he chats with you, a hand cocked to the side conversationally, is oddly cute.

And then, up close, you see bloodstains on his coat. Some are browned and look old and washed-out; others are still coppery red. Your heart rate ratchets up.

Then Dr. Habit gently angles your face up to him, pushing on the underside of your chin with a few fingers to force your eyes from the bloodstains. “Listen up close: it all has to start with a smile.” He beams softly at you, the picture of guileless innocence in the face of a grown man. His voice is serious and free of the cartoonish lilt that had suffused it earlier. “One smile can turn into _dozens_ or even _hundreds.”_

He moves his hands to your cheeks and brushes his thumbs against the corners of your mouth. He doesn’t pull them into a smile like you expected; he just rests his hands there, cradling your face.

Dr. Habit’s jumps from cartoony to gentle to menacing are unnerving, and through the rapid cycling of his demeanour, his lilting voice and mannerisms somehow contrast all of it. Something is _wrong_ about him but you can’t put your finger on what.

His words regain a bit of that sing-song quality from before: “And maybe, just maybe, if you had a smile big enough…” Leaning forward now, he looms instead of just standing close. You suddenly feel _uncomfortable_ , a feeling different from your earlier panic. It makes you want to cover up or disappear or escape his eyes.

He smiles.

“…you could cheer up the whole world.” He’s close enough now that you can faintly feel his breath on your face but all you see are his teeth. There’s so many. You can’t look at his eyes. So many teeth. They smell of old blood, coppery like a nosebleed. Corner to corner, all teeth; a hellscape of molars and canines contained within a mouth and pressed into your face. There are multiple rows of them like a shark or a beartrap. You can feel him watching you take in his smile, but you’re terrified to look back up and meet his eyes, after he’s shown you _this_.

Then the hands release your face and the teeth disappear behind another closed-mouth smile as Dr. Habit backs away, leaving you staring at the sunny walls. Dr. Habit leans around you to pull a small wheeled table out from behind the dental chair, giving you a whiff of floral shampoo as his hair presses close to you. He’s chattering again, smooth-voiced, about teeth and globes and grins and flowers as metal rattles ominously behind you.

Dr. Habit pulls back into view and pushes his hair back over his shoulder. He gazes almost adoringly at a pair of forceps. “If smiles are contagious, then I am a bioweapon.”

You’re hyperventilating.

This can’t be happening. You feel far away and you keep trying to wake yourself up from the situation, as if you’re only dreaming. Dr. Habit jumps around the room as if dancing and rambles on a little more, but you can’t focus on his words anymore. You think he knows but doesn’t care. You barely even realise when he draws a small amount of clear liquid from a vial into a fine-needled syringe.

Then Dr. Habit taps the needle’s plunger against your lips playfully as if knocking on a door, recapturing your attention. “I’ll use your teeth for the greater good. Just like they say, ‘You must crack a few chickens to make an omelette.’”

He grabs a pair of forceps with his other hand. “But no more fun and games. We’re going to be having fun _only_ , instead. Now, open says-a-me!”

You know exactly what he’s asking but you keep your jaw clenched tight, feeling like you’re about to crack your molars. The silence extends between you two, and his orange eyes glimmer at you from the crinkled slits above his smile, watching. You shake your head “no”.

There’s a tense moment where you both stare at each other, him obviously appraising. Then he sighs melodramatically like a soap opera star, a hand pressed to his forehead. He sets down his forceps and the needle, the _tink_ of metal on metal quiet yet impossibly foreboding. “I didn’t think it would be easy like that, you know? Still, I hoped.”

With sudden speed, he slides in against you and pries his thumbs into the corners of your jaw. He digs the soft flesh of your cheeks against the edges and points of your molars, opening cuts and sores in them, until he finds a gap between your upper and lower jaws; he presses in sharply, forcing open your mouth. As horror tears through you, some detached part of you wonders how he’s so strong; how many times he’s done this, to have it feel so practised. Keeping one thumb pressed between your jaws to force them open, he leans over to grab something from his table and slides it between your teeth before quickly retracting his fingers.

Immediately, you try to clamp your jaw shut, but you’re stopped by the object he placed between your teeth; something firm and rubbery, like a doorstop. Your jaw cramps with the effort of trying to bite down and failing.

Dr. Habit sighs and leans back. He pulls your lips back, making cooing noises in admiration at your teeth, as if he were baby-talking a toddler or a pet. Desperately, you slam you arms against your restraints, rattling them loudly. Your gums, where they line your teeth, are starting to tingle in horrified anticipation. You don’t want him to take your teeth.

He slides the needle into your mouth, unheeding of how you press your head against the chair, shaking with the strength of your instincts screeching at you to _getawaygetawaygetaway._ “Now, this,” he begins, “is just something to make your gummies a little quieter.” There’s a sting and a feeling of fullness in your gums. The feeling of it solidifies the images that had been flickering through your mind, piles of bloodied teeth on the tray, rusty forceps in your mouth. It feels like your fate is cementing as the numbing agent works, draining sensation from your gums. This can’t be happening. “There. Can I take your teeth now? They’re so pretty, all grown up. Not one milk tooth in sight. All blossomed and flowering.”

You shake your head “no”, breathing rapidly through your nose; but he doesn’t notice your response as he reaches over to grab the pair of forceps.

He starts with your right lower canine, muttering about getting the “bitey ones” out of the way. You’re shaking with the strain of your jaw and neck muscles; pressing so hard against nothing, trying to get away from Habit, they feel about to snap. His forceps clink against your tooth ominously before he pulls _._

There’s mild pain, but the feeling of _movement_ deep in your jaw is nauseating. You gasp and freeze up, horrified at how wrong it feels. Dr. Habit huffs a little laugh; staring glassy-eyed at the ceiling, you can’t see his face, but you can imagine those orange eyes glowing at you like they did in the darkness.

And then it rips out. There’s a sensation of tearing paper or fibre, like ripping a handful of wet grass, and you almost retch. You feel the tooth coming out and you swear you can hear it, too, the sensation echoing across your jaw; and then blood flows out, pooling against your tongue, tasting like death. Your tongue moves to lap at the new hole in your mouth on instinct like a dog licking a wound.

Dr. Habit holds the tooth up to your eyes fondly, like a nurse handing you your own newborn. “Look at that! One perfectly grown little pearly white.” You recognise the familiar shape of the canine that sticks out above your gum, but it fades into pink then red towards the bottom, with its strange-shaped protrusions that were once rooted in bone.

The dentist puts your tooth somewhere on his tray with a little _tink._ You stare at the ceiling and try to lose yourself in the off-white texture, floating out of your body and up into the gaps between the cork tiles.

He doesn’t give you a break. He’s already leaning in with the forceps, clinking them playfully against your incisor, right at the front of your mouth. But when he pulls up on your tooth this time, it _hurts_ , raw and crackling in your jaw, all the way into your temples. The dissociation that had clouded you clears in a snap. The pain is tinted with wrongness, like bending a finger backwards or dislocating a kneecap; a stark difference from the removal of the first tooth, where you only really felt the movement and the ripping.

When the tooth eventually tears out of its socket, your vision is dark at the edges and you’ve gone rigid like a corpse, your arms and legs pressed up against their metal bonds. More blood fills your mouth and you can feel it dribbling down your chin, which Habit dabs at with a cloth and a warm smile. “It is hurting? It shouldn’t. Your heart is going thump-thump so fast, it’s moving all the medicine out of your blood. I already used a shot on you, and there are many patients still in line. You must work on this anxiety! We have the Habitat for a reason, you know! We could… talk it out.” He giggles at his own joke, making you sick.

But Habit doesn’t stop, despite him acknowledging your pain. He pulls out your next incisor and your canine without a break; and over time, the pain intensifies without more anodyne. You have no outlet for it; you can’t scream or yell or communicate at all, except for how your body contorts itself against the agony. Somehow, the lack of expression makes the pain even worse; forces it to pressurise within you like air in a shaken soft drink. Agony coils deep in the bone of your jaw and blooms wetly when Dr. Habit wiggles a tooth to shimmy it out of socket.

The whole time, Habit mumbles compliments to you; mainly about how pretty your teeth are, but sometimes about you, how well you’re handling it and how quiet you are.

You wish he would kill you.

When Habit pauses to cradle your chin in his hands and admire his handiwork, four teeth are gone. Four. The pain numbs everything in your head except itself, leaving you unsure of who or where you are; expanding in your skull like a balloon and leaving no room for anything else. You run your tongue along the holes in the front of your mouth and dazedly count them again. Four.

Habit goes quiet and still, suddenly. Since you’d awoken in the chair, he’d been unable to stop moving, whether he was dancing around the room or tapping his foot against the dental chair, but now he’s stopped. You gather the energy to look at him and see that Habit is staring openly at your mouth, unsurprisingly; but his eyes are open and calculating, above his catlike smile. His gaze analyses the holes in your front teeth with the intelligence he’s so good at masking with childish phrases and cartooned movements.

Something is wrong.

He takes a thumb and presses down against the holes in your jaw.

Air wheezes out of your trachea in a nonvocal scream. Your vision whites out and your mouth flies open and your jerk your head away from Habit’s hand, pain ringing bright and shining into the marrow of your jawbone. The bite block that had been wedged between your molars falls limply onto your tongue, and you finally shut your mouth fully, the cramp in your jaw easing. The relief is only minor compared to the thunder of pain leftover from Habit’s thumb. You squeeze your eyes shut as tears run down your face, spurred by agony and overstimulation.

“You have given me a lovely idea, flower child. The best idea I’ve ever had – except for the Big Event. Well, except for a lot of ideas. Oh, I don’t play favourites; I play games, sillyhead. …Or, should I say sleepyhead? Open your eyesies.” Habit pats your cheek, trying to get you to focus on him. When all you do is roll your head limply to the side, he snaps your fingers obnoxiously in front of your face until you meet his eyes. His orange eyes stare into yours with a sincerity that unnerves you, makes you want to curl in on yourself until you disappear from existence. Something is wrong. You feel _seen_ , visible like you’re naked on a stage in front of thousands of people. “I want to use your teeth. In fact, I will use your teeth. But I think I want to use your mouth, too.”

The silence extends for longer than it should and he looks at you the whole time and then you realise what he means. He watches as dread drips down your spine and he smiles wider at whatever expression ends up on your face: that’s all the confirmation you need.

Habit reaches for his forceps again and reaches into your limp jaw, resets the bite block. As his hand retracts, you have the fleeting thought that you could have bitten down, but everything seems inevitable, now. You feel lost and hopeless, all your fight drained out of you through the holes in your mouth.

And then he goes for your upper front tooth. “First, we have to pull these. They’ll get in the way – they _are_ in the way…” He pulls and tears and the pain, this time, shocks up through your nose and into your eyes, springing tears from your eyes as agony rockets up into your forehead. Your nose runs and you can feel your face dripping into even more of a mess, tear-stained and snotty and smeared with cracking, drying blood. The agony supernovas with a _pop_ as the tooth comes loose, then recedes into a rattling ache that leaves you dizzy.

When he goes for the second one you let out a voiceless screech, like the whistling a beaten dog makes as the air presses out of your lungs.

You retch when you hear your tooth drop onto the tray, and Dr. Habit is at your side in an instant, in a hollow caricature of bedside manner. “Oh! No, we do not want that. Relax. You are messy enough. Shh, shh…”

He slowly cards a hand through your hair.

You hate that it’s almost pleasant. You hate this almost-care even more than him pulling your fucking teeth out. You hate that you’re relaxing into the touch like you have Stockholm syndrome. You hate this so much.

You start to cry, tears borne not from the pain this time, but from sheer misery. Dr. Habit wipes at your face with a scratchy cloth and whispers to you some more, but you’re barely listening.

Six. Six teeth gone.

Habit sighs dreamily. “You’ve been a very, very, very good patient so far.” He steps around to your front and you see the new bloodstains on his sleeve joined in the spatters of the others. “You are so lovely.” Leaning in, he tips your chin up with one finger and drags his thumb over your lips, smearing blood. He ghosts over the holes in your jaw and you feel phantom pains where your teeth used to be. You shudder, but you can’t pull away; you’re pressed as far into the chair as you can be.

“Now.” Habit clasps his hands together, almost hesitant all of a sudden. “I… haven’t done something like this… in a dentist chair. And _in my_ _office,_ too!” He gasps, making a play of being scandalised; then he beams at you with all of his teeth, the whole nightmarish display of them. He clambers up into the chair, setting his knees on either side of your hips.

Nonono. You’re screaming on the inside. No. Stop.

He rises up onto his knees; he’s so tall that his groin is level with your face like this, and he hunches over you to grab the chair’s shoulder. “But this will be lots of fun. Right, flower child? New things are always fun.”

No. No. No. You squeeze your eyes shut.

Something unzips, out of sight. “Flooower kiiiid…” he sings. A hand brushes against your face; fingers come under your chin to tilt your jaw up and a thumb presses lightly against the corner of your mouth. “Oooopen wide. Be a big crocodile for me.”

Your mouth opens just a hair wider and you feel _something_ brush against your lower lip – not calloused, like his fingers are. It traces a path through the blood and spit. Oh God. You’re disgusted and you hate yourself for ever thinking you could help Dr. Habit; naïve, self-righteous idiot that you are. Now look where it got you. The invisible voice above you – almost like God, you think bitterly – darkens, losing a bit of its sing-song. “Now, no funny business. No biting. You’re not a doggy, you’re a little dogtooth lily. I can make this so much worse for you if I feel those teeth. …Not that you have many left in the front,” he chortles playfully.

You want to die. You open your mouth wider, earning you the sound of low, pleased laughter from above. “Perfect. All red as a rosie and pretty as one. You like rosies, don’t you, flower kid?”

You want to die.

He presses slowly into your mouth. Your empty gums slide against him, sending bolts of thunder through your skull and making Habit keen happily above you. “Oh. Perfect…” he groans, rolling the R exaggeratedly. Your eyes fly open with the pain. You try to see through the sparks in your vision, deliriously hoping you’d see Kamal standing in the doorway, coming to save you; but all you can see is Habit’s stomach and the creased fabric of his coat and scrubs. He smells of blood and disinfectant and something vaguely floral.

You feel like you’re dreaming. The world’s edges blur and colours wash out; frosted glass covers your eyes like you’re looking through a sugar glaze, a glossy and cloudy veneer over everything. Breathy gasps and half-formed compliments echo somewhere above you but you’re beyond comprehending language. Even as Habit digs his fingers into your hair to hold it in place, clawed fingers etching lines in your scalp as he thrusts shallowly in and out, it feels more like you’re watching a movie of this happening; the protagonist on-screen just a puppet or an object, detached from you. This could be a news story, something gruesome like a murder or a pile-up motor wreck, that you turn away from with a muted sense of discomfort.

The rhythm Habit keeps is slow and almost tender. Savouring is a good word for it.

Or he’s just trying to keep the head of his dick pressed against your gums. The thought is nauseating, so you decide to feel relief instead that he’s not going deep. You let yourself float even farther away, focusing only on breathing through your nose.

But then Habit shudders and presses all the way in against your windpipe. Like reaching the end of a bungee cord, you catapult back into reality with a shock. You gag with your whole body, throat spasming violently.

“So pretty; so soft…” Habit’s breath stutters above you and he grips your shoulder, squeezing tighter and jerking against your tongue until he spills down your throat.

You gag again at the taste and the _feeling_ of it, but it makes Habit moan, a little breathy “ah” as he tugs painfully on your hair. Bile curdles in your stomach and you thrash against the restraints, torn between fighting down vomit for your dignity’s sake or taking shallow revenge by puking all over Habit, until he finally pulls out, dragging himself luxuriantly and painfully against your ruined gums. He leaves a trail that beads on your lips as he exits, one that cools uncomfortable and tacky as you gasp heavily, exhausted and limp in the chair.

Habit laughs aloud, breathlessly. He keeps one hand in your hair as he leans back, regathering himself. “Flower, you’re a natural. Wow, wow, wow. My little daisy. Perfect-er than anything I’d grow myself. Well, almost. Only I could grow tooth lilies, the perfect- _est_ flower – oh, I remember my Lily… he had such pretty teeth. Yours are almost as perfect as his.” You turn your head to the side and dry-sob as he zips up.

You want to die.

“I think I would like to keep you,” muses Habit. “In a little pot, watch you bloom; like a work of art, petals all rosy-red… and white now, too, haha.” he sighs and runs a thumb through the mess dribbling out of your mouth. “But. You’re not my Lily. You’re more an apple tree; an entire orchard! I need your teeth and I must pull them out. We are gonna make the whole world happy with the teeth you’ve grown for me! I promise. I’ll put your little pearlies to good use. I promise, I promise. And everything else?” He gestures airily with one hand to the rest of your body. “Hmm. That’s a little predicament. A predica-little-ment –” He starts to sing a little whimsy before cutting himself off with a gasp. “Oh, flower kid, of course. Flowers grow from more flowers, going munch-munch on the ground with their roots, building themselves with the stemmies and leafies of old, dead plants. And I’ve been meaning to have more flowers blooming in here, so bright and pretty. We can use you, still.”

He squishes your cheeks with his clawed hands, beaming with the full force of all his teeth into your horrified eyes. “But first, before your body goes to the soil, I need _all_ your teeth. There’s _only_ twenty-six left to do! You’re almost done! Sort of.”

He pries your mouth open again with his horrifically strong hands and resets the bite block, despite how you tense your jaw like iron. “Relax. Think of what flowers you want to grow, okay? You make such a good rosie – you could grow a ring of them – or maybe a pocketful of posies…” Habit hums the rest of “Ring Around the Rosie” to himself, leaning in with his forceps and tapping them against a molar to the beat.

For once, you take his advice. You think of lilies as he pulls up on the first molar.

**Author's Note:**

> Happiness Fakt #26: Kamal comes in to eavesdrop when Habit is forcing Flower Kid's jaws open, then figures out what's happening when he hears "Now, this is just something to make your gummies a little quieter." He spends the rest of the fic pressed against the waiting room wall, safely out of Habit's and Flower Kid's view, listening in abject horror but too scared to do anything.


End file.
